This article is indicative and general in nature. I am NOT a certified investment advisor. Each of us has individual circumstances — these observations may not be suitable for everyone to follow blindly. This is shared purely for educational purposes.
It is the twenty-fifth of the month, and somewhere a message has arrived to say ₹5,000 has been debited and units have been allotted.
That is the tenth such message this year. The first one landed in January, when the Nifty was at its all-time high of 26,373. Today it sits around 22,600. Ten instalments, ten months, and the number at the bottom of the app is smaller than the sum of what went in.
The worst part is how little has happened. There was no crash. No terrible Monday, no front page, no WhatsApp forward telling you to be brave. Just a slow grind, three per cent here, one per cent there, for the better part of a year — and a standing instruction that goes out on the twenty-fifth whether or not any of it is working.
If you have been wondering whether you are the only idiot still doing this, I have wondered it too. Let me show you two things.
You are not plankton
Here is what happened in the Indian market last month, in the segment where actual shares change hands.
| October 2026, through the 23rd | Net flow |
|---|---|
| Foreign institutional investors | −₹51,466 crore |
| Domestic institutions | +₹59,110 crore |
Foreigners sold fifty-one thousand crore of Indian shares. Domestic institutions — mutual funds, insurers, pension money — bought fifty-nine thousand crore. For the whole year, foreign investors have pulled out somewhere between ₹2.3 and ₹2.8 lakh crore, reportedly the largest exit on record, and domestic money has absorbed all of it.
Where does the domestic side get the money? From the twenty-fifth of the month.
In September, SIP contributions in India hit an all-time high of about ₹32,490 crore. That is roughly ₹1,080 crore arriving every single day, whether the market is up, down, or shut for Ayudha Pooja. It arrives because a few crore people set up an instruction years ago and have not cancelled it.
Your ₹5,000 is in that number.
Your five thousand rupees is one line in a figure that outweighed the largest foreign exit in the history of this market.
Let me be precise, because precision is the whole point here. Your individual instalment did not hold up the Nifty. Nothing you did on the twenty-fifth moved a price anywhere. But the thing that met a record foreign exit was a few crore standing instructions, of which yours is one, aggregated by funds obliged to deploy the money as it arrived. No sovereign fund. No government rescue. No single large institution deciding to step in.
For as long as I have been investing, the understanding was that Indian share prices were set by people who did not live here — and who could leave on a Tuesday for reasons that had nothing to do with India. A rate decision in Washington. A spread in some credit market. A rebalancing in a fund that holds forty countries.
Foreign investors took about $13 billion out of Indian equities over the course of 2008, reversing years of steady buying.
There was no domestic bid of any consequence to meet them. Mutual fund penetration was thin, the SIP was a niche product, provident fund money was not allowed anywhere near equity. So the price did the only thing it could. It fell until it found a buyer somewhere, and by December the Indian market had lost more than half its value.
This year they left on a larger scale than that, and the market is down fourteen per cent.
I am not going to tell you the fall is finished or that the cushion makes us safe. It does neither. What it did was change the shape of the fall — fourteen per cent over ten months instead of fifty per cent over twelve. That difference was bought by people putting in ₹2,000 and ₹5,000 and ₹10,000 a month, most of whom have no idea they did it.
You are also not the only one
The second thing I wanted to show you is what everybody else did while you were feeling foolish.
49.68 lakh SIPs were discontinued or completed.
63.26 lakh new SIPs were registered.
AMFI's stoppage ratio — SIPs stopped against SIPs started — came in at 78.5%, down from 81.1% in August. That was the fifth consecutive month it fell.
Read that in the right order. Ten months into a market that has given them nothing, more Indians started a SIP than stopped one, and the gap was widening.
Some of those sixty-three lakh registrations are people doing this for the first time, in the tenth month of a decline. Whatever you have been feeling on the twenty-fifth, a very large number of people felt it and kept going anyway.
Why none of the headlines are usable
Now the part that saves you time for the rest of this fall.
Every few days there is a story about foreign investors dumping Indian equities, usually with a number in crores large enough to feel like a verdict. I went through the October session data in detail to see what those numbers could tell a small investor.
The answer is nothing at all, and here is the short version of why.
The imbalance is a rounding error. Add up all of October: foreigners sold ₹51,466 crore, domestic institutions bought ₹59,110 crore. The difference between all buying and all selling for the entire month comes to about ₹7,600 crore — around two-hundredths of one per cent of the value of the Indian market. That cannot explain a fourteen per cent fall, and nobody should pretend it does.
Flow numbers are not pressure. A flow figure tells you how much changed hands at whatever price it changed hands. Two sides can match each other rupee for rupee while the price falls all day, because the quantities are equal and the urgency is not.
The index is priced somewhere you cannot see. Most of the action that moves the Nifty happens in futures and options, not in the shares themselves. On the nineteenth of October the Nifty fell 1.11% while foreign cash selling was barely ₹1,100 crore — the move came from a derivatives market no retail investor needs to look at.
So when the next "FPIs pull out ₹X crore" notification arrives, there is no action hidden inside it for you. It is weather. Close the tab.
What your ₹5,000 has actually been doing
This is the part nobody says out loud, because it sounds like consolation. It is arithmetic.
A SIP buys units, and units get cheaper when the market falls. Take an index fund tracking the Nifty, and ignore expenses and tracking error to keep the sum clean:
| Your ₹5,000 instalment | Nifty level | Units it bought |
|---|---|---|
| 5 January, at the all-time high | 26,373 | 0.1896 |
| 8 October, the worst day of the fall | 22,231 | 0.2249 |
The same ₹5,000 bought 18.6% more units in October than it did in January.
That is the entire mechanism. Your January instalment was expensive and you did not know it. Your October instalment is cheap and it does not feel like it. Ten months of a falling market means your average cost per unit now sits well below the level you started at — which is why your portfolio is down far less than the fourteen per cent you keep reading about, and why the recovery reaches you sooner than it reaches the index.
If you want to check this on your own statement, look for the average cost or average NAV per unit rather than the total value. The total value tells you what the market thinks today. The average cost tells you what you have been building.
What history says about the wait
Someone has done the arithmetic on every Indian market fall of this kind. WhiteOak Capital went through every Nifty 50 drawdown of 10% or more since 2000 — eighteen of them.
| Base rate since 2000 | |
|---|---|
| Falls of 10%+ that went on to 15%+ | 11 of 18 (61%) |
| Average worst point | −23% |
| Share of the fall spent near the eventual low | 1% to 7% |
| Falls of 20%+ that eventually recovered | all of them |
| Median time to recover | 7.5 months |
Three things to take from that.
Most ten per cent falls become fifteen per cent falls, so this one being at fourteen tells you very little about whether the worst has passed. The window where prices sit near the actual bottom is a few days inside a whole year — which is the arithmetic reason nobody catches it, including everyone who later claims they did. And every fall of twenty per cent or more in this market has recovered, with half of them back inside eight months.
You do not need to identify the bottom. Your instruction on the twenty-fifth buys through it without being asked.
What a slide actually comes for
The habit is the part that matters, and a slide is built to wear it down.
A crash tests your nerve for one morning. A slide tests your habit for a year.
That is the real risk in front of a small investor right now, and it has nothing to do with foreign flows or the rupee or anything on business television. It is the perfectly reasonable thought that arrives in month eleven: this isn't working, let me pause it for a few months and restart when things look better.
Things look better after the price has gone up. That is what "looking better" means. The pause costs you exactly the instalments that were going to be the cheapest ones.
The one case where stopping is right: if this money is needed in the next two or three years, or if there is no emergency fund behind it, or if the SIP is funded by borrowing. None of those are market calls — they are about whether the money should have been in equity at all. Basics of Investing covers the order these things go in, and Part 3 covers how much equity your situation can carry.
And one thing you do not have to carry
There is a temptation in everything I have written above, and I want to close it off.
Do not keep your SIP running as a service to the nation.
The cushion under this market is a by-product. A few crore households are each doing something sensible on their own timeline, and the aggregate happens to work as a shock absorber. Keep an instalment going out of duty and you have swapped a good reason for a bad one — bad reasons break at exactly the wrong time.
Keep it running because the money has five years or more to sit, because your emergency fund is intact, and because 0.2249 units beats 0.1896 units for the same ₹5,000.
Two things worth doing today
Neither of them has anything to do with where the market goes next.
Pick the exit date now. You chose a start date for your SIP. Almost nobody chooses an end date, and that is where the real damage gets done. Write down the year you need this money — fees, a down payment, retirement. Count back three years. That is when you begin moving it out in tranches into a short-duration debt fund or a liquid fund. Better still, set up an SWP that moves a fixed amount every month without asking how you feel about it.
You automated the entry so your emotions could not interfere. Automate the exit for the same reason.
If the market is high when your three years begin, moving money out will feel stupid. Do it anyway. If it is low, you will want to hold on for a recovery — and that is the moment a plan turns into a gamble. Your daughter's fee date does not move because the Nifty did.
Goals set the exit. The market gets no vote.
Do not push harder because it looks cheap. Those 18.6% extra units are no instruction to triple your SIP or empty your bonus into the market. Fourteen per cent can become twenty-three — that is the average worst point in the table above — and nobody knows which way this goes, including me. Money going in today needs the same five years as the money that went in January.
If you have genuine surplus and a long horizon, stage it over several months rather than in one go. If it is your emergency fund, next year's fees, or borrowed, it has no business in equity at any price.
The rest of it — a record foreign exit met and absorbed by ordinary Indian savers, the first time in this market's history — is something you helped do without trying. You are allowed to feel good about it on the twenty-fifth. You are not required to make it your job.
Related Reading
- When Markets Crash — why falls feel the way they do, and what history actually shows
- When Markets Crash — Part 2: The Survival Playbook — asset allocation and rebalancing, before you need them
- Equity Mutual Funds — Part 3: Understanding Risk — how much equity your situation can carry
- Basics of Investing — insurance, emergency fund, asset classes, in that order
- Your First Crore — why time and consistency beat timing
Disclaimer: I am NOT a certified investment advisor. This is shared purely for educational purposes. Markets carry risk, and past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Always do your own research.
